A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn‘ fool if they weren’t.

Isn’t it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Writing music is just like writing a book.

The answer to all writing, to any career for that matter, is love.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

One can not reflect in streaming water. Only those who know internal peace can give it to others.

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

We spend our lives, all of us, waiting for the great day, the great battle, or the deed of power. But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary. So long as our being is tensed, directed with passion, towards that which is the spirit of all things, then that spirit will emerge from our own hidden, nameless effort.

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels – men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?

There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.

When I do have free time, I spend it with friends, or I spend it at home writing or making something.

People are more aware now of cities and of different ways of life. I suppose the writing I do is a bit in the past, and I’m not sure it’s the kind of writing I would do if I were starting now.

I believe in the spirit of equality and the spirit of this country as one of love and compassion and kindness.

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

Whatever the reviewers feel about ‚The Casual Vacancy‘, it is what I wanted it to be, and you can’t say fairer than that as a writer.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

For a long time, I had the idea that I would do a certain amount of work the best I could, and then I would reach a comfort zone, and I wouldn’t be pushed to write more. I would become a different person. It’s a surprise to me that this hasn’t happened. Your body ages, but your mind is the same.

Although I write screenplays, I don’t think I’m a very good writer.

I was married a few times, and one of my husbands was jealous of me writing.

‚For Whom the Bell Tolls‘ was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

I became an actress because my mom wanted me to become an actress. It took me until my mid-30s to realize I actually didn’t. I actually wanted to write and direct and be more involved in politics and humanitarian issues.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

Lena Waithe won an Emmy for writing while starring on the Netflix show ‚Master of None,‘ but it might be more accurate to call her a Master of Everything.

Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again – as I always am when I write.

You can stroke people with words.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can’t. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don’t think they’re doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

I have great respect for the semicolon; it is a mighty handy little fellow.

If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.